The format says nothing of the DRM layered on top. Apple uses EPUB + their own DRM rendering their device incompatible with other stores. But it still doesn't make sense to use a proprietary format and deny people the ability to read non-DRM'd EPUB books. I wonder if Amazon permits alternate e-readers on their app store.
It makes me sad that Amazon don't support it natively.
Amazon is an Apple wannabe. They want the entire cake to themselves including the distribution format. They might have had the technical excuse of not supporting EPUB on their e-ink devices for legacy / constraint reasons. They have no such excuse for tablets.
Yes and it's ridiculous. My own opinion is if a console is capable of serving as a media / DVD / blu ray player it should offer that functionality either out of the box or as an add-on. The alternative is people have to wire up 2 devices for no valid reason at all. Funny thing is Wii modders have enabled DVD playback functionality so the excuse that it is impossible doesn't fly.
That's why I'm suggesting they'd charge for it. Or use the licence fees as an excuse not to support it at all.
Microsoft has never given a crap about physical media. All that business about supporting HD DVD was just to string out a format war and a few fingers into the patent pie. As soon as the format's back was against the wall they bolted leaving Toshiba to clean up the mess. Their real push in the last few years has been to build out a digital content delivery platform. By supporting physical media they're offering consumers a choice and we can't have consumers "confused" by choice now can we?
Apple is even worse than Microsoft. Apple even sat on the blu ray board at one time but even now there is no blu ray support in their OS. They spouted BS arguments that it was a "bag of hurt" despite multiple 3rd party player software existing for Windows. Even if they could claim that they needed to implement protected paths through their video drivers to the display, all that infrastructure has been long built out to protect their own service. Yet the OS is still lacking blu ray support. They too have plans to deliver digital content but want to control everything from end to end so could be regarded as even worse than Microsoft.
They could support blu ray and their own proprietary format from the same drive. Though Microsoft being Microsoft they'd probably not support Blu Ray even if their drive were physically capable of doing so, or if they did of charge $20 or something to enable the functionality.
which will pretty much guarantee that site lands on my permanent "do not visit" list.
I doubt the site hugely cares or they wouldn't have taken action in the first place though the more diplomatic might attempt to explain to you that the content costs money to produce and host and that money is derived from ad revenue.
Tell me, though, what's the difference between "freeloader" and "person who wants the web to operate at a decent speed with all this here bandwidth available"?
None to the site you're visiting unless your user agent said you were using a mobile or something. You're a freeloader. And what about their bandwidth you're leeching without any intention or possibility of compensating them for it by viewing or clicking ads?
Like others have said, if "you" or "your site" serve ads that aren't obnoxious, Flash(®)y, popping up/under/over/down/in/out, data-collecting, page-grabbing, content-masking, survey-taking, usage-tracking, loud, seizure-inducing, eye-bleeding, *totally* inappropriate, or just downright frackin' toxic, then I just might consider easing up on the ad filter for your site.
Extensions like AdBlock Plus let users subscribe to block lists. e.g. EasyList. These lists are not set up on the basis of "obnoxiousness", rather they filter out stuff emanating from virtually every ad provider and metric site based on hundreds of regular expression filters. So I don't accept your premise that a) all sites with advertising are obnoxious, b) most people using an ad blocker even bother to test the site with ads to see if it is obnoxious or not. So the ad blocker catches "good" ads along with the bad. e.g I expect most people consider google text ads to be fairly innocuous and low bandwidth but they're hoovered up with all the rest.
There have been a few sites which will complain if you block their ads but not many. I'm surprised that there hasn't been a more wholesale backlash against ad blockers given that visitors who block ads are basically freeloaders. It would be fairly simple to test if ads are being blocked or not with some inline JS and take the appropriate action. What that might be is open to discussion but I expect there are ways to devalue the content commensurate with the devalued visitor, e.g. don't show any news articles in the last 12 hours for example.
Of course it's propaganda. You don't light up 3 massive "trees" on the border of your sworn enemy without the intent to piss them off, demoralize their population, encourage defections, sow discord, promote religion etc. All the while pretending to be wishing the North a happy christmas. It's for the lulz basically.
There are more than enough similarities in the form factor, detailing, packaging, headphones, power adapter, and even in sanctioned peripherals between the Galaxy Tab and the iPad to be more than a coincidence. Samsung was aping the iPad and it was obvious Apple was going to sue them. There are more than enough non-Apple tablets out now to see this was a concious decision by Samsung and they got burned for it. While I don't like Apple one bit I am not in the least surprised that they chose to sue.
The patent disputes is a whole different issue. I have no sympathy for Apple getting back a little of what it has dealt out.
Every app store is able to remotely kill purchases, either explicitly or by "updating" the app to a null state. I expect the main reason is damage limitation for malware, but beyond that it could be used to fix billing screwups, court ordered removals and so on.
But there are 17 labs on Earth working to weaponize Ebola.
I hear there are 57 varieties of Ebola too. More seriously if some nation were to mysteriously start inoculating its population against some rare pathogen such as ebola, it is rather likely that it would be noticed. It's also likely that in the period of time taken for this contagion to spread that said nation would be on the receiving end of nuclear volleys lobbed at it by the infected countries.
What difference does it make if zcat is generic or not? The point is that if the file is in a binary format, then a tool can be written that turns it into a textual format. I don't see people complaining they need a special tool to make sense of a git repository, so why should it be a big deal to need a special tool of a log file? If the log files are sitting there on the disk then the chances are the tools are there too. I credit Red Hat with not doing something stupid which is of no use to administrators.
I don't see that as a big deal for 2 reasons. First if you are using Red Hat's logging tools, you are almost certainly going to have the client tools for inspecting and if Red Hat are on the ball there will be server and client packages as well as developer libs. The second reason is exactly the same as could be applied to any other package. I can't inspect what's in git's database without git installed to do it.
No matter your experience, plain-text logs make more sense, especially in *nix operating systems. You have a vast array of tools to search log files with; my favorites being tail and grep. The minute you go to binary logging your options shrink or you end up having to use additional tools to reconvert it to text (ie. the Windows event log).
Except you already see binary log files on Unix. Log files are frequently compressed with gzip. I don't see a big difference between someone typing (for example) "zcat file.gz | grep somestring" and "redhat-log-cat | grep somestring" assuming that was the name of the tool they used to crap out a logfile from the binary db.
I'd also note that tools like git are happy to store things in binary objects yet still present stuff in textual format to the user.
Groupon's problem is they shit so hard on prospective customers with the hard sell that their tactics are more akin to scorched earth than a sustainable business model. One burned business tells all the businesses down the street and before you know it, the regional deals are reduced to fish pedicures and similar service industry dross. If Groupon wasn't fucking businesses over by expecting them to provide service for 25% of the normal revenue and provided the tools for businesses to stay in control of a promotion (e.g. by limiting the rate of sales or putting a hard cutoff on total sold) they might just enjoy word of mouth that would result in repeat business coming their way.
A more reasonable coupon service wouldn't even bother with the hard sell, at least not for small fry customers. They should let businesses come to them through good word of mouth and a decent self service interface where a business could create their own campaigns with their own limits and run them for a more reasonable % of the cut. What exactly is the problem here?
So Groupon IMO is doomed. Sooner or later someone is going to produce something far more palatable for businesses.
More accurately they floated 5% of their debt (since their company is in the red), used the IPO to give themselves a cash injection, perhaps hoping that the stock would rise so they could sell more stock. If the stock goes down the shitter though then the chances of raising money through future offerings is reduced and ultimately fruitless. I think Groupon have one shot to turn this around before Christmas and then they're screwed.
Well its a nice show of faith by Amazon, let the hacking begin!
It's not a show of faith, it's a legal obligation. And releasing just the GPL parts means squat for pretty much anybody. I suppose the kernel drivers might come in handy but if you were expecting to see the client code rather than some Linux glue you can forget it.
Your chances of getting a six figure salary in a meat grinder like EA are quite low. Maybe it happens if your lead designer or some other notable on a premium game, not if you're some dogsbody slaving to design Barbie's petal dress for some stupid shovelware. And yes obviously there is a recognition that when a project comes to an end you might be expected to sprint to get the project done on time. That much is expected occasionally. The problem comes when sprint becomes the norm, when the company is simply fucking over its staff and making them work 60 hour weeks because it's promised absurdly tight deadlines that it can't meet any other way.
Look at Team Bondi as an example of how to run a team into the ground. The grind went on for years. People left because of the pressure and toxic atmosphere. The net result Bondi had a constant turnover of burned out angry staff and had to work the remainder even harder to make up for lost time. They were so deep in the red by the end that even when they released a product they got shut down. It does no one good to work in that kind of atmosphere. Not the games company and certainly not the employees. It's not the norm in any other form of software development and it really shouldn't be the norm for games development either.
I expect the biggest risk to building down, especially in Mexico city is earthquakes. I'm not sure it helps a building or occupant's survivability to be underground and surrounded by soil which would liquify and do its utmost to squash the build like a bug if / when Mexico gets its next magnitude 8 quake. At least when the building goes upwards the foundation is likely to be solid concrete and the entire building resting on enormous shock absorbers.
The Daily Mail is the newspaper which supported Oswald Mosely and the blackshirts before WWII and really hasn't changed much since. It serves mittel England - closest facists who read it because it confirms their worst fears about immigrants, homosexuals, alternative lifestyles, councils, taxation, "nanny state" with a dose of jingoism thrown in top.
The normal modus for the paper is to write a headline barely supported by the article, top load the article to support the headline and then give any mitigating or factual information right at the bottom after the damage has been done.
Aside from its far right tendencies it also has the peculiar habit of dividing the known universe into things which cause or cure cancer, sometimes both. It can also be grossly hypocritical at times, such as when the UK Daily Mail was railing against cervical cancer jabs for teenage girls, while the Irish Daily Mail was campaigning for cervical cancer jabs for teenage girls.
It's probably best to recognize the paper for all it's fit for - hamster cage liner.
Sadly, you don't really need an appreciation of evolutionary biology to be a doctor.
Well yes you do. Germ theory is inextricably linked with evolution - the modelling of epidemics, bacterial resistance (superbugs), pathogenic pathways, genetics etc. How can you possibly be a doctor without understanding those things? It's so fundamental to medicine that it should be a core requirement of every student. If they fail the course or boycott they should be flunked.
Flunk them. Students are there to learn science, not to selectively pick and choose which parts they wish to believe in. If someone is stupid enough to sign onto a course which conflicts with their faith then they deserve to be tossed out at the earliest opportunity. They're wasting their time and the college's.
Of course he does. He has as much say as he wants. He could even go so far as to pardon every single person convicted of the crime until the government took the point that it's stupid law that even the King doesn't like.
GNOME 3 has extensions. The whole point of it is that if you need something the base UI does not supply that someone can come along and write an extension for it. Mint is just demonstrating that.
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The format says nothing of the DRM layered on top. Apple uses EPUB + their own DRM rendering their device incompatible with other stores. But it still doesn't make sense to use a proprietary format and deny people the ability to read non-DRM'd EPUB books. I wonder if Amazon permits alternate e-readers on their app store.
It makes me sad that Amazon don't support it natively.
Amazon is an Apple wannabe. They want the entire cake to themselves including the distribution format. They might have had the technical excuse of not supporting EPUB on their e-ink devices for legacy / constraint reasons. They have no such excuse for tablets.
Yes and it's ridiculous. My own opinion is if a console is capable of serving as a media / DVD / blu ray player it should offer that functionality either out of the box or as an add-on. The alternative is people have to wire up 2 devices for no valid reason at all. Funny thing is Wii modders have enabled DVD playback functionality so the excuse that it is impossible doesn't fly.
Microsoft has never given a crap about physical media. All that business about supporting HD DVD was just to string out a format war and a few fingers into the patent pie. As soon as the format's back was against the wall they bolted leaving Toshiba to clean up the mess. Their real push in the last few years has been to build out a digital content delivery platform. By supporting physical media they're offering consumers a choice and we can't have consumers "confused" by choice now can we?
Apple is even worse than Microsoft. Apple even sat on the blu ray board at one time but even now there is no blu ray support in their OS. They spouted BS arguments that it was a "bag of hurt" despite multiple 3rd party player software existing for Windows. Even if they could claim that they needed to implement protected paths through their video drivers to the display, all that infrastructure has been long built out to protect their own service. Yet the OS is still lacking blu ray support. They too have plans to deliver digital content but want to control everything from end to end so could be regarded as even worse than Microsoft.
They could support blu ray and their own proprietary format from the same drive. Though Microsoft being Microsoft they'd probably not support Blu Ray even if their drive were physically capable of doing so, or if they did of charge $20 or something to enable the functionality.
which will pretty much guarantee that site lands on my permanent "do not visit" list.
I doubt the site hugely cares or they wouldn't have taken action in the first place though the more diplomatic might attempt to explain to you that the content costs money to produce and host and that money is derived from ad revenue.
Tell me, though, what's the difference between "freeloader" and "person who wants the web to operate at a decent speed with all this here bandwidth available"?
None to the site you're visiting unless your user agent said you were using a mobile or something. You're a freeloader. And what about their bandwidth you're leeching without any intention or possibility of compensating them for it by viewing or clicking ads?
Like others have said, if "you" or "your site" serve ads that aren't obnoxious, Flash(®)y, popping up/under/over/down/in/out, data-collecting, page-grabbing, content-masking, survey-taking, usage-tracking, loud, seizure-inducing, eye-bleeding, *totally* inappropriate, or just downright frackin' toxic, then I just might consider easing up on the ad filter for your site.
Extensions like AdBlock Plus let users subscribe to block lists. e.g. EasyList. These lists are not set up on the basis of "obnoxiousness", rather they filter out stuff emanating from virtually every ad provider and metric site based on hundreds of regular expression filters. So I don't accept your premise that a) all sites with advertising are obnoxious, b) most people using an ad blocker even bother to test the site with ads to see if it is obnoxious or not. So the ad blocker catches "good" ads along with the bad. e.g I expect most people consider google text ads to be fairly innocuous and low bandwidth but they're hoovered up with all the rest.
There have been a few sites which will complain if you block their ads but not many. I'm surprised that there hasn't been a more wholesale backlash against ad blockers given that visitors who block ads are basically freeloaders. It would be fairly simple to test if ads are being blocked or not with some inline JS and take the appropriate action. What that might be is open to discussion but I expect there are ways to devalue the content commensurate with the devalued visitor, e.g. don't show any news articles in the last 12 hours for example.
Of course it's propaganda. You don't light up 3 massive "trees" on the border of your sworn enemy without the intent to piss them off, demoralize their population, encourage defections, sow discord, promote religion etc. All the while pretending to be wishing the North a happy christmas. It's for the lulz basically.
The patent disputes is a whole different issue. I have no sympathy for Apple getting back a little of what it has dealt out.
Every app store is able to remotely kill purchases, either explicitly or by "updating" the app to a null state. I expect the main reason is damage limitation for malware, but beyond that it could be used to fix billing screwups, court ordered removals and so on.
It's inaccurate because the simulated Earth is not resting on a 4 elephants or a giant space turtle.
But there are 17 labs on Earth working to weaponize Ebola. I hear there are 57 varieties of Ebola too. More seriously if some nation were to mysteriously start inoculating its population against some rare pathogen such as ebola, it is rather likely that it would be noticed. It's also likely that in the period of time taken for this contagion to spread that said nation would be on the receiving end of nuclear volleys lobbed at it by the infected countries.
What difference does it make if zcat is generic or not? The point is that if the file is in a binary format, then a tool can be written that turns it into a textual format. I don't see people complaining they need a special tool to make sense of a git repository, so why should it be a big deal to need a special tool of a log file? If the log files are sitting there on the disk then the chances are the tools are there too. I credit Red Hat with not doing something stupid which is of no use to administrators.
I don't see that as a big deal for 2 reasons. First if you are using Red Hat's logging tools, you are almost certainly going to have the client tools for inspecting and if Red Hat are on the ball there will be server and client packages as well as developer libs. The second reason is exactly the same as could be applied to any other package. I can't inspect what's in git's database without git installed to do it.
No matter your experience, plain-text logs make more sense, especially in *nix operating systems. You have a vast array of tools to search log files with; my favorites being tail and grep. The minute you go to binary logging your options shrink or you end up having to use additional tools to reconvert it to text (ie. the Windows event log).
Except you already see binary log files on Unix. Log files are frequently compressed with gzip. I don't see a big difference between someone typing (for example) "zcat file.gz | grep somestring" and "redhat-log-cat | grep somestring" assuming that was the name of the tool they used to crap out a logfile from the binary db.
I'd also note that tools like git are happy to store things in binary objects yet still present stuff in textual format to the user.
A more reasonable coupon service wouldn't even bother with the hard sell, at least not for small fry customers. They should let businesses come to them through good word of mouth and a decent self service interface where a business could create their own campaigns with their own limits and run them for a more reasonable % of the cut. What exactly is the problem here?
So Groupon IMO is doomed. Sooner or later someone is going to produce something far more palatable for businesses.
More accurately they floated 5% of their debt (since their company is in the red), used the IPO to give themselves a cash injection, perhaps hoping that the stock would rise so they could sell more stock. If the stock goes down the shitter though then the chances of raising money through future offerings is reduced and ultimately fruitless. I think Groupon have one shot to turn this around before Christmas and then they're screwed.
Well its a nice show of faith by Amazon, let the hacking begin! It's not a show of faith, it's a legal obligation. And releasing just the GPL parts means squat for pretty much anybody. I suppose the kernel drivers might come in handy but if you were expecting to see the client code rather than some Linux glue you can forget it.
Look at Team Bondi as an example of how to run a team into the ground. The grind went on for years. People left because of the pressure and toxic atmosphere. The net result Bondi had a constant turnover of burned out angry staff and had to work the remainder even harder to make up for lost time. They were so deep in the red by the end that even when they released a product they got shut down. It does no one good to work in that kind of atmosphere. Not the games company and certainly not the employees. It's not the norm in any other form of software development and it really shouldn't be the norm for games development either.
I expect the biggest risk to building down, especially in Mexico city is earthquakes. I'm not sure it helps a building or occupant's survivability to be underground and surrounded by soil which would liquify and do its utmost to squash the build like a bug if / when Mexico gets its next magnitude 8 quake. At least when the building goes upwards the foundation is likely to be solid concrete and the entire building resting on enormous shock absorbers.
The normal modus for the paper is to write a headline barely supported by the article, top load the article to support the headline and then give any mitigating or factual information right at the bottom after the damage has been done.
Aside from its far right tendencies it also has the peculiar habit of dividing the known universe into things which cause or cure cancer, sometimes both. It can also be grossly hypocritical at times, such as when the UK Daily Mail was railing against cervical cancer jabs for teenage girls, while the Irish Daily Mail was campaigning for cervical cancer jabs for teenage girls.
It's probably best to recognize the paper for all it's fit for - hamster cage liner.
Sadly, you don't really need an appreciation of evolutionary biology to be a doctor.
Well yes you do. Germ theory is inextricably linked with evolution - the modelling of epidemics, bacterial resistance (superbugs), pathogenic pathways, genetics etc. How can you possibly be a doctor without understanding those things? It's so fundamental to medicine that it should be a core requirement of every student. If they fail the course or boycott they should be flunked.
Flunk them. Students are there to learn science, not to selectively pick and choose which parts they wish to believe in. If someone is stupid enough to sign onto a course which conflicts with their faith then they deserve to be tossed out at the earliest opportunity. They're wasting their time and the college's.
Of course he does. He has as much say as he wants. He could even go so far as to pardon every single person convicted of the crime until the government took the point that it's stupid law that even the King doesn't like.
GNOME 3 has extensions. The whole point of it is that if you need something the base UI does not supply that someone can come along and write an extension for it. Mint is just demonstrating that.